The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools.

The project, called WireDoo, has been two years in the making, said Hammer (real name Stanley Burrell) Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

At the conference, he said what will make his search tool better than Google (or, too legit to quit, if you will) will be its "deep search" ability.

"It's about relationships beyond just the keywords," he said, according to Mashable, a CNN.com content partner.

The rapper-turned-entrepreneur (after some late-90s difficulties) said a search would render not just direct results, but also information on possibly related topics. Its tagline is: "Search once and see what's related."

Other details about the product were scarce.

WireDoo, which Hammer said he has a team developing, is still in pre-beta. Its website is currently letting people sign up to test the search engine when a beta release is ready.